The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Snake Island, Controversial Chimps, Brussels Sprout Vindication

Episode Date: January 5, 2022

Arielle Duhaime-Ross—host of Vice's A Show About Animals and Vice News Reports—joins the show this week! The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week is a podcast by Popular Science. Share your weirdest facts and stories with us in our Facebook group or tweet at us! Click here to learn more about all of our stories!  Click here to follow our sibling podcast, Ask Us Anything!  Follow our team on Twitter! Rachel Feltman: www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman Sara Kiley Watson: www.twitter.com/SaraKileyWatson Popular Science: www.twitter.com/PopSci Produced by Jess Boddy: www.twitter.com/JessicaBoddy Theme music by Billy Cadden: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6LqT4DCuAXlBzX8XlNy4Wq?si=5VF2r2XiQoGepRsMTBsDAQ Season 5 of The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week was recorded using the Shure MV7 podcast kit. The kit includes a Manfrotto PIXI mini tripod, so everything you need to get recording straight away is included—that’s super-helpful if you’re a creator who’s buying their first mic set up. Check it out at www.shure.com/popsci. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/popular-science/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/popular-science/support Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Did you know that there's an online cannabis company that ships federally legal THC right to your door? I'm talking about mood.com. They have an incredible line of cannabis, dummies, and a lot more, and you can get 20% off your first order at mood.com with promo code Weirdest. It's third party lab tested and ships directly to you in a discreet box. Best of all, everything's backed by Mood's 100-day satisfaction guarantee, and like I said, you can get 20% off with code Weirdest. So if you're looking to try some new cannabis products, head on over to mood.com. Get 20% off your first order now with code weirdest. That's code weirdest for 20% off. Your summer starts now with Memorial Day deals at the Home Depot.

It's time to fire up summer cookouts with the next grill for burner gas grill on special buy for only $199. And entertain all season with the Hampton Bay West Grove seven-piece outdoor dining set for only $499. This Memorial Day get low prices guaranteed at the Home Depot. While supplies last, price invalid May 14th or May 27th. U.S. only exclusions apply. See Home Depot.com slash price match for details. At Popular Science, we report and write dozens of science and heck stories every week. And while most of the stuff we stumble across makes it into our articles,

we also find plenty of weird facts that we just keep around the office. So we figured, why not share those with you? Welcome to the weirdest thing I learned this week from the editors of Popular Science. I'm Rachel Fultman. Sarah Kylie Watson. And I'm Ariel Zimros. Ariel, welcome back to the show. Thanks for having me again, guys. Yeah, it's been a while. And since you were last here, you have started a new show at Vice. Would you tell our listeners a little bit about that before we get into it? Yeah, I guess I was already on the other show,

right? Because I host two podcasts. So now it's the other one we had previously talked about. I don't remember which show you were getting ready for last time you were on. Ariel, Who has had many podcasts. Yeah, okay, so, yes. So I currently host two podcasts. One is called Vice News Reports. It's a weekly news show at Vice. It is very good documentary style.

Like we really try and make it sound immersive. And then the other one, which is maybe a little bit more relevant to this audience, is called a show about animals. And it is, can I say this? It is a total delight. That's how I feel about it. Of course you can say that. I mean, okay, let me say that. That's how it feels for me working on it.

Like a total delight. And basically what I'm going to be talking about today is like the entire subject of season one of that show. So I'm not going to talk about a show bad animals for too long. I thought you were going to be like, can I say like, can I say this? It's mother fucking bananas. Like anyway. And I was going to be like, yeah, we can bleep it.

It's fine. So on the weirdest thing I'm doing this week, we start by each offering up a little tease about some kind of fact or story we found in the course of reading, writing, reporting, making a whole other different podcast, et cetera. And decide which one we absolutely have to hear more about first. Then once we've all had time to spin our little science yarns, we reconvene and decide what the weirdest thing we learned this week actually was. Sarah Kylie, why don't you start with your teas? So I am talking about how one of America's least favorite vegetables kind of found its way to popularity and on the menu of pretty much anywhere you can go get swanky dinner. Okay, cool. I love an underdog, a comeback story.

All right, my teas is that I want to talk about Snake Island, a place called Snake Island for good reason. I'm in already. I think this is just for you, Ariel. Ariel studied herpetality as an undergrad, and I know that because we are good friends. And I said, snakes, absolutely. Yeah, I'm in. Ariel, how about your teas? So I will be talking about how a field of research in psychology that was trying to teach American sign language to great apes like gorillas and chimps back in the 1970s,

completely imploded. So that's why I'm here. Amazing. Hmm. What do we want to start with? I think I am so intrigued by the kind of clickbait cliffhanger of Sarah Kylie's story that I would love to hear about these vegetables. I think the thing is that I'm like, I think I know which vegetable it is and I just want you to give me the answer like now, now.

The thing is you 100% know it. Like this is like a weirdest thing that kind of like has like been trickled. Like I've seen seen this discourse happening multiple times. But I was like, I need to actually figure out what the world's going on. It's time to address the nation. Address the nation. Yeah. So if you haven't guessed it already, I am talking about.

Da-na-na-na, Brussels sprouts. Yay. So these days it seems like you can't go get food anywhere without there being Brussels sprouts on the menu and some variety, you know, fried or like roasted with like fancy dipping sauce. And this is relatively new, like in the past like handful of years. Most of our first associations with Brussels are like the glompy, steamed or boiled little mini-cabages that kind of smelled awful and were forced fed to us.

But especially if you grew up in northern Europe in the UK, Brussels sprouts have been a staple for centuries. So lots of people are used to the glomp. But like a lot of our vegetable favorites, Brussels sprouts, as we know them today, have come from a long line of genetic modifications. Even one in the last few decades that has taken them from an icky side dish that when overcooked can have a heinous old egg smell to something many joyously dip in an aoli like a cute cabbagey French fry. So how do we get there? Let's start at the very beginning. So we're starting at level one of the Brussels sprouts, the ancient history of Brussels sprouts.

As long as humans have farmed, and that's, you know, 10,000 years or so, they've been picking and choosing ways to make their crops tastier, survive better, grow bigger, and so on. And the Brussels sprout is the same as any other. Its oldest relative being the Brasica Oloricea, also known as the ornamental or wild cabbage. And honestly, this wild cabbage looks more like a weed that would grow off the side of the highway than in somebody's... It's not like those weird ornamental cabbages they have all over the city. like there's just a lot of cabbage going on it all comes wait like there's a couple ornamental cabbages all over the city you know that i notice nothing rachel but what are you talking about so you'll i feel like if you google ornamental cabbage you'll be like oh because in planters in urban areas i feel like particularly around new york often in like really commercial districts instead of flowers the planter will

will have basically like a very purpley. Yes. Yes, I have seen those. It's just a very robust, colorful cabbage. But every time I see them, I'm like, in fact, actually during like the early months of the pandemic when you had to wait like an hour outside a grocery store to get food at best, yeah, there they are. We'll post a picture on popside.com slash weird for those of you know, but I would be like, I would be like, you know, it was like a three hour expedition to go get groceries if I was lucky. And there were a bunch of ornamental cabbages, like, left to die in the building next to me. And I was like, should I, like, steal these?

Should I, should I, like, reappropriate this cabbage for the people? Anyway, I didn't because they got really gross looking very fast. So by the time my canned goods were in low reserve, the cabbage no longer. appealed. And also it had been out in like the ucky city air. I don't know. It was like a sidewalk cabbage. It wasn't. It was a sidewalk cabbage. Not very appealing cabbage. Anyway. I feel like I've totally derailed this conversation, but I was like, what are you talking about? And now my life is damaged. So thank you. No, I'm here for all the cabbage discussion. I'm happy to hear all of it. But the oldest, like the ancientist cabbage cousin, like kind of looks like this like highway.

weed. It's got these long spindly leaves and these little yellow flowers that pop up. And it originally sprouted a long limestone in the coastal Mediterranean. But actually, this little weedy looking thing turned into a bunch of different things. So while that doesn't sound like a tasty salad base, basically modified of that versions of that same species have made it to your plate at some point. It's like every plant. Like a lot of plant. It's like the least. It's like the least. It's like the leafy green grandpa. Yeah. And so according to this researcher at Purdue in Aegean osmos, the Brassica Oloracia is the starting

point species for kale, collared greens, Chinese broccoli, cabbage, Brussels spouts, colerabi, broccoli, and cauliflower. It's all basically just a funky version of this little weed-looking thing. I love that. Yeah. Like we've all been eating the same kind of thing and just a bunch of different varieties. but all of these different things came from messing around with cultivating different bits and pieces of the actual plant. So the first one that we messed with was the leaves.

And by around 300 BCE ancient Greek botanist Theoprestus was already talking about the leafy varieties of brassica, like kale and collard green looking things, which are the most similar to the original wild cabbage and were created through breeding for expanded leaves. You know, this is probably the moment where I should admit that I thought you were going to talk about kale, not Brussels sprouts. Honestly, like, their stories are so similar as it is like their cousins. But this one, there's a twist in this. Okay. There's an additional, like, he-he-haha in there.

So, but later, okay, so we've got the kale. The kale is the first, the kale in collared and leafy greens like that are the first among things that are, you know, developed. And then came the big cabbage, which is the terminal bud, a cluster of immature leaves arising from the chute maristem tissue on the original plant. And a big terminal bud plus those kale-like leaves gave way to what we know today as white, red, and savoy cabbage. Okay. And then next, we get the beloved Brussels sprout,

which is an expansion of the auxiliary buds or the little buds that line the side of the stem. So there's smaller versions of the terminal bud, and that's why they look like little cabbages. And there's a lot of debate as to when anyone figured out how to do this, but it's likely sometime around the 13th century and, of course, Brussels Belgium, Brussels sprouts. To get Brussels sprouts in their best form, you have to chop them off of the stem while the little leaves are still bound tight, or they will actually just grow into their own little stems.

The Purdue researcher Oznes wrote that you can actually see the little auxiliary stems, the stems that are about to happen. If you slice Brussels and braze them in stock, and then toss them with brown butter in which you have popped brown mustard seeds. So I've not done that yet. I don't really have any popped brown mustard seeds around. round. But if you wanted to see the stems of the little Brussels sprouts doing their best, that's a fun little science experiment that might end up tasty.

Cool. And it's good for the holidays too, right? Brussels spouts? Yeah. Yeah. And Thanksgiving and Christmas are like the ultimate Brussels sprout o'clock. Right. Like they sell a bunch of them right now. So you did this on purpose, didn't you? You were like, I want to be seasoned. Well, I mean, it ended up working out well. I think I just like was like, I know that the Brussels sprout story is weird. And so I finally like was like, okay, we're going to spend some time on it. But for the rest of the Brasica family, the further expansion of the stem gave way to colerabi, which looks like a little radish with a bunch of stems creeping out of it. And then expanding the inflorescence or the clusters of those little flowers gave us broccoli

and cauliflower. And then mixing and matching with cauliflower and veggie breeding, gave us broccoli and brocow flower as well. So we've got this whole pile of things that we love to eat today. Or, you know, if you don't like veggies and you don't love to eat them. You might eat them. You might have to eat them so that you can stay healthy. But they all came from the same thing.

But something that stuck around from the original plant, the little weedy guy, was the resistance to cold weather. And I'll talk about that in a little bit more. But that probably helped all of these different varieties of plants take off around different parts of Europe and the world. And Brussels sprouts had made it themselves to like France, England and so on, around the later 18th century. But because these were such hard.

plants, they had a bitter taste. And so in the past couple of years, there's been more research on where they get this bitter taste from and why people sometimes are like, ew, I don't want to eat this. It's so bitter. And so the bitterness comes from glucose scintillates in Brussels and other members of the Brasca family, which they have an important role of defending the plant against pests and herbivores, like munch, much, munching them. And in the past few years, there's been a handful of studies that this compound might help

humans ward off bacterial, viral, and fungal infections in their intestines and other parts of the body. And some studies out there, you know, take with a grain of salt say they may even lower your risk of certain cancers. So lots of help. We already knew that, though. If you eat kale and lots of stuff like that, you're doing a good thing for your body. But recent research has shown that some people have a certain gene called the TAS2R3A gene. Really catchy stuff right there. that interlocks with a chemical called phenoliocarbamine. So I may have just completely ruined that, but if you want to do the pronunciation,

I honor you, that is fabulous. But it's called PTC as well. And so this gives off the taste of bitterness. And kind of in the same way that certain molecules lock into our tongue surface proteins to tell you if something salty, sour, or sweet, these proteins are like extra tough with bitterness. So if you have this gene,

you're going to notice bitterness a lot. more. And while Brussels and their brassica siblings don't contain PTC, the glucosinolates in the plant break down into isothiocyanates when they're damaged or cooked. These isothiocyanates have similar properties to PTC, which means to around 70% of the population, Brussels give off some seriously bitter flavor. Honestly, Brussels in general are bitter, but for this group of folks, the bitterness is nearly unbearable. And the hatred of bitterness is genetic, of course, so if you can't stand your leafy greens, you can literally blame your parents. Love that. But let's throw some history back in here, since this is a little bit of a history story

as well, but back in the 1960s, farmers starting using seeds that increased their yield of Brussels sprouts, but not necessarily their yumminess. A Brussels sprout farmer named Steve Bonadilly told Mel last year that in the late 1960s, the industry switched over to mechanized harvesting, which required a plant that would mature fairly evenly over the entire set. stem. So the cicada seed company developed the first plants that would mature evenly, and they were beautiful and green with lots of production, but they were horribly bitter, and we turned off an entire generation. Wow. Oh, interesting. We've got these bitter brussels that are popping up. And also, like, Brussels are still kind of niche as we're going into this.

Like, not everybody's just, like, frying up brussels sprouts. Like, they're still mostly being eaten in the northeast in Canada and then over in Europe and, like, the UK, where they're, you know, being boiled. So kind of as the really bitter ones proliferated, there were a lot of people who were like, that was the first time they were eating them. So they weren't like what happened to the Brussels sprouts. Yeah. So the Brussels sprouts were already bitter to begin with.

And then 70% of people were like, these are too bitter. And then we started breeding extra bitter ones. So we just have this, you know, storm of Brussels bitterness. But nowadays, so we fast forward today, they're everywhere and people love them. Right. So we're going to walk through that little bit now. So throughout a decent deal of the late 20th century's Brussels sprouts were just pretty nasty, especially when boiled.

And those glucosinolates could really express their self-re stench. So if you've ever overboiled Brussels sprouts, you know the smell. Yeah. Yeah. So it's not delicious. But then everything started to change in the 90s when a Dutch scientist named Hans von Dorn, who was then at Novartis, but now the seed part of that company is called Singenta. He put two and two together.

he said glucosinilates were why people didn't love Brussels. He and other Dutch researchers started doing some interbreeding between the hardy, high-yielding varieties of the modern day with the less glucosinolate-filled varieties of the past. So we're making a new version that has still some of that, you know, easy to harvest, tough, but not, you know, super, super bitter. And according to Pym Nefios, who is now the leader of the leafy green and brassica department at Syngenta, said that the scientist did taste test with people,

which is kind of funny when you think about Brussels sprouts like back in the 90s. Because, you know, you do taste tests with like strawberries and tomatoes because you buy those because you want them to be tasty. Brussels sprouts, you're like, oh, yes, this is a healthy food and I'm going to boil it and force it, feed it to my children. But they did a bunch of taste tests. And basically they found that the glucosinolates did correlate with people liking them. Most people, especially younger folks, prefer the milder, less glucosinolate heavy varieties.

but older people actually stuck to their roots and they were like, we like the bitter ones. So I don't know. I don't know what to take away from that. And good for them. Good for them. Good for them. Brussels spress just don't taste the way they do, they used to, you know? They literally don't taste the way they used to.

Get to be really mad about everything, including Brussels. This is the one thing where it's like, okay, they really have changed. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Back in my day. Back in my day. Yeah. So in around 1994, the mild varieties started coming out onto the market. And then from the early 2000s and onwards, they have kind of exploded.

So thanks to a growing awareness of how healthy they are and probably the fact that they don't taste awful anymore, seven out of ten Brussels sprouts now come from Syngenta, the place where they figured all of this out. And Bontadelli, that Brussels sprout farmer, he's talked to a lot of people about this. I have a lot of fun quotes from him that I've gleaned during this process. But he told NPR in 2019 that there were only about 2,500 acres in the whole country planted with Brussels sprouts just a few years ago. But, you know, today there are 10,000 acres of Brussels sprouts in the U.S. And since there's year-round demand for Brussels sprouts now, everybody wants them with, you know, like fried up with bacon. Or I'm an aoli dipper myself.

I do like to, like, chop them up and then have like a little fun dip. But people want them year-round. And so there's tons of fields being planted in Mexico as well, just so we can keep. keep having more Brussels sprouts, which it would have been crazy 20 years ago when everyone just was like, uh-uh, no, thank you. And also, so another fun thing is that demand is swapped from mostly frozen Brussels to fresh. So back in the day, it was like an 80-20 frozen fresh. And now 85% of them are being like farmed for fresh and then 15% for frozen. So more people are figuring out that if you don't, you know, steam them, et cetera, like they might taste a little

better roasted. And so, yeah. But just thinking, like, in 2008, there was a, there's a poll from Heinz, I think, that showed that Brussels sprouts were America's most hated vegetable. And nowadays, they are literally everywhere. And that's, that's for a reason. And it's because of genetic modification. That's the reason for Brussels sprouts at all. And it's the reason why they are yummy now. So that's my little story. Cool. I love this because I, Like, I remember hearing a few times throughout my adulthood, like Brussels sprouts being used as Brussels sprout as the like top example of like, yeah, you didn't like that when you were a kid because like bitter flavors bother kids more.

And then you got used to them as an adult. And it's like, no, that was a lie. That was a different thing. They were gross and I knew they were gross. And when I was two years old, the world changed for the better. Exactly. I know. No more gaslighting on Brussels belts of not being good.

Like they're good now. They were not good then. Right. Exactly. I really feel like this is kind of a wonderful story. I am, I'm assuming you don't have the answer to this next question. So I maybe shouldn't ask it. But do you know what is the most hated vegetable today?

I was wondering that too. I honestly don't. I think it was like the second place or maybe kids hated eggplant the second move or something like that. Yeah, sure. I can see that from a textural standpoint. Yeah. I'm not a big eggplant girl either, so I understand.

I like it, but it's one of those things that a lot of people cook wrong. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's also part of it is learning how to cook your vegetables. The guy from Syngenta was like, everyone just needs to learn how to cook as well. Everyone just needs really fair. and we're talking about many demographics in America. It's like let's figure out how to cook the vegetables

to make sure they're as delicious as possible. I mean, I spent my whole childhood thinking I hated pork chops specifically, which was very weird because I didn't dislike other pork products. And then I realized that my grandma, God bless her soul, an angel who provided so much care and love for us, was really bad at cooking pork chop. She would just... Yeah.

She would cook those within... Just fry the heck out of them. A centimeter of their life. Yeah, well, and it's because I think there was... She was taught that, like, they were dangerous if you didn't cook them enough. And I think that was, like, a really common thing in, like, 60s American cooking.

So anyway, I think probably a lot of things we don't like, we are just bad at making... That's probably true. It's probably true. Well, important reminder to always be open to trying things you hated as a kid because maybe a genetic engineering seed company has fixed it for you in the interim. Maybe the Dutch scientists are looking out for you and making it better as we speak. All right, we're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with some more facts.

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Okay, we're back. And I'm going to talk about Snake Island. So one of the ways that I often find facts for this show, because I keep needing to find new facts. I was able to get through like the first two seasons based on just like stuff I knew for Right. But then I started having to occasionally pull into outside stories. So one of my favorite methods is just like tooling around really silly listicles about like bizarre moments in histories, trained places in the world, et cetera. And like most of those stories are fake or mostly fake or at least really difficult to talk about with any kind of authority or substance.

but like maybe one in 10 if I'm lucky ends up being a thread worth pulling and that is what happened when I was looking at a list of the most dangerous places in the world. Oh, that's perfect. Which I feel like it's a very relative statement. There are many people for whom the world at large is quite dangerous. Right. For me, like midtown on St. Patrick's Day, pretty dangerous. Yeah, Santa Con.

Not good. Yes, I was going to say Santa Con. That's my snake island. Yeah, right. Absolutely true. But one of the features on this list really intrigued me, and it turned out to be like a pretty cool evolution story. So this place is frequently referred to as Snake Island.

It's in Brazil. Its actual name is Ilada de Kimada Grange. It's off the coast of Song Paolo. And its name is Portuguese for Island of the Big Burn, which I feel like is kind of a little bit menacing in its own right, which we'll get to in a bit. But there's a reason why most people

do not call it by its proper name and rather call it Snake Island, because its primary year-round residents are heaps of extremely venomous snakes. Heaps of them, you say. Yes, heaps. Heaps. actual heaps. They're called Bothropes in Solaris, or the golden lance head.

And when I say heaps, I mean heaps, estimates used to suggest that there were as many as one to five snakes per square meter on this island. An actual survey by ecologists a few years back, they were like, that's absurd. Don't be crazy. It's definitely just one steak per square meter. Okay, good. Great. That makes me feel so much better.

normal number of snakes. Oh, yeah. Great. Awesome. So the Navy only goes there like once every year, even once every couple of years. I read conflicting things to check on the island's lighthouse, which has been automated since 1920s, so no one has to live there full time. And the lighthouse is just there to keep ships from going there by accident. So scientists can get like special permission to go on like research expeditions there.

but for the most part, there are no people, and there's definitely no one who lives there. When we talk about like the Chernobyl exclusion zone, like there are people who secretly live there, and the government's just like, we look away, no one lives here. It is pretty small. It's just like 106 acres, I want to say. So it's not exactly like prime real estate that people are desperate to live on, but people have tried. really so yeah there are some really gruesome legends from folks over on the closest part of the mainland including that the last people who lived there which would have been the family of the person

who ran the lighthouse right before it was automated in 1920 that they were like not just killed by venomous snake bites but that they were like stalked as prey by a gang of vipers like something out of a sci-fi channel original movie. Right. I want to say that there, no one has confirmed this. This almost certainly did not go down like that. But probably someone did die of a venomous bite.

There must have been some prompt for them to be like, we're not going to have people work this lighthouse anymore. I don't know much about lighthouse history, but I feel like 1920 was pretty early to have an autonomous lighthouse. So they must have really been motivated. So we can't confirm the like scary stories like that. But they do have incredibly potent and fast acting venom. And do we have an anti-venom for it?

So that's a good question. I don't know that we have one specifically for this snake. But I also, anti-venom is one of those really cool subjects that I have not dove that deep into. So, um, that's fair. So these snakes more than just like the urban legends around them and the like inherent freakiness of them like owning this island. Um, they have this really intriguing backstory. Uh, so around 11,000 years ago, which is when sea levels were rising due to melting ice

sheets after the last glacial maximum, the ocean rose high enough to cut off a strip of land from the rest of Brazil. And that's the roughly 106 acres now known as Camada Granger. And it's possible it was already sort of an island, but it would have been like a very, like very shallow water separating it from the mainland or it may have been connected. So that shift, making it a tiny little island, trapped some number of snakes in the genus Bothrops, which is a type of venomous pit viper found in the South and Central Americas. So they were in this brand new home, and it was one that, as far as scientists can tell,

had no natural predators for them, at least against adults. Like the baby snakes might get eaten sometimes by little critters because baby snakes are tiny. But it's just some frogs, some bugs, some lizards, some birds, and a whole bunch of vipers. No, thank you. I think I shan't visit. So on the one hand, there was nothing keeping these slithering predators from reproducing like crazy, which is how you end up with a snake per square meter on your tiny island. But on the other hand, they didn't have a lot of great food sources.

Juveniles can be seen living on like millipedes and stuff like that. But the biggest prey available to adults would have been. birds. That poses a little bit of a problem. Birds are not easy prey for a lot of snakes. I mean, these snakes are seen to go up in trees to hunt, but they don't, it's not thought that they're like super comfy in trees. They don't have a truly perensile tail. They seem to only go up there to try to find prey. They're not particularly arboreal. And so most snakes in this genus hunt by biting their prey once, letting it go, and then stalking it to a hack again as it weekends and they track it by like sniffing it out sniffing its chemicals as it

runs across the ground which is great for like a ferret or something I don't know a mammal um not so great for a bird exactly um so yeah a bird doesn't have to be able to get very far to get out of a snake's easy reach especially since when it's flying through the air the snake can't really track it by smell um so instead it seems that the snakes that thrived on this island were the ones that were able to keep prey in their mouths after that first bite. And if that's how you're trying to hunt, having extremely potent venom is pretty important because you need to get them knocked out quickly enough that they're not just going to be like,

ah, f you, I'm a bird and fly away. Or like harm the snake, right? Totally, yeah, all that flapping, pecking, absolutely not. All that flapping and pecking. Oh, my God. So we don't have a great handle actually on how deadly this venom is in a practical sense for humans. Because humans have kept their distance. But we know that their closest relatives on the mainland can absolutely kill humans.

And chemical analysis shows that the venom of these island snakes is more potent and faster acting than their close cousins. by like a lot. One caveat there is that these snakes haven't had access to mammals to prey on for at least those 11,000 years. So the renam has definitely evolved to specifically target like insects and reptiles and birds. But I wouldn't recommend like trying to test out how much protection that offers a human. Probably not going to be a fun time. And I promise we'd get back to the islands only slightly less threatening official

name before wrapping up. So Isla de Camada Granger means island of the big burn. It refers to like a slash and burn or a wildfire. And apparently at some point, there was an effort to burn the rainforest there, either to make room for banana plantations or to just like provide home for fishermen, depending on who you ask. I wasn't able to find a date for when this happened or any further details, but it is the name of the island. So I feel like that, you know, pretty pretty plausible that this occurred at some point. But it also clearly failed, as the point would have been to clear out the snake habitat.

And the snakes are still there. Like snakes won, human zero, the island of the big burn was not sufficiently burned. Wow. But despite their scary countenance, their spooky vibes, these snakes are in great danger, and it is our fault. they're critically endangered in fact because this island is their only native habitat, which is what happens when rising sea levels just trap you and a few of your homies on

a small body of land. Apparently deforestation on the mainland has also decreased the number of migratory birds that hang out around the island. So that threatens their main food source. There's also naturally a lot of inbreeding, and that is probably going to start causing problems if it hasn't already, as the gene pool like folds in on itself too many times. And then also I've seen mentioned in a few places, a historical, shall we say, overzealousness of scientists who visited collecting specimens, though I think people have been

much more careful about that in recent decades. So I think that was probably a pretty small part of the problem. Unfortunately, because humans are awful, there's also an extremely lucrative of poaching market for these vipers. Simply because they're rare. People like rare things. So poaching isn't to have them as pets? Yeah, for the exotic pet trade. So, yeah, don't do that.

That's rude, I would say. Bad move. So rude. And also, like, very dangerous. Like, I don't want one of those in my home. Like, no. I don't judge people who live a lay. of crime, but like don't hurt animals and also don't go to an island that's so full of poisonous

snakes. Venomous. Sorry, it's venomous if they have to bite you. It's poisonous if you have to bite them. Always important to remember. There are several in captivity throughout the state of San Paulo. If you want to visit without breaking the law and let's be real, probably dying. So if you want to see these snacks.

go to Brazil and there's there are definitely some zoos and research institutions that will hook you up. Cool. That's my story. I love that you called them sneck. Snick island. I feel like I learned a lot about this island. It's also really interesting that like the bird population and the like insect population has been able to sustain them for so long.

Yeah. There's always that fear that like they'll breed too. much and then their food sources will collapse. But I guess the fact that they rely on birds has been really helpful for them. Right. Because they could have new animals come in, but then like, you know, as you mentioned,

deforestation and whatnot. Yeah, I don't know. That's like, what, I was like, I was waiting for this story to take a turn for the cannibalism. I was like, the baby snakes don't survive. Like, oh, okay.

Well, you know, I think it's really interesting from an evolutionary perspective is that you know, so many, most animals, when we think about their evolution, it's the pressure they're getting is like avoiding their own predators or hunting specific prey. And obviously these snakes have evolved around specific prey, but their only predator is other members of their own species. So, you know, they, they haven't run quite as rampant as like, say, a goat. because goats don't tend to kill each other. I say that carefully with a tend

because I'm sure it's happened at least before. So, yeah, I hope the snakes continue to thrive because, like, you know, they can have that island. Yeah. They should have it. They've had it for so long. They're not hurting any before. Diversity.

Except there's maybe that latehouse guy in 1920. But since then, they've been. They've been totally minding their business. So Rachel, I haven't looked up these snakes. Are they cute? They look like, I would say they look like a viper. And someone who's neither afraid of snakes nor like particularly fond of them. It's a pretty, yeah, they have like a nice yellowy color.

They're definitely golden, as their name says. They have very pretty golden eyes. I would say they're pretty. I wouldn't necessarily say they're cute. They're a little too big to be cute. They're not quite like anaconda size. But, you know, depending on how our listeners feel about snakes, their opinions may vary wildly in either direction. I mean, I love snakes, but I have a really, really healthy fear of them.

So, yeah, I think they're gorgeous. Yeah. But that's me. I do think they're beautiful. Very few snakes I would call cute. But it's a semantics. Well, that's where we differ, Rachel Feltman. Okay, we're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with one more fact.

You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your ocean front room. Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected.

When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton for the stay. Okay, we're back. And Ariel, talk to us about animals, sign language, humans. Yeah. Yeah. So the story I want to tell is one that I've been telling in a much longer, and larger format for season one of a show about animals. So, you know, I'm going to attempt to try and kind of like boil it down a little bit and not give you too much, but give you some of the good stuff, you know, because I also want you to listen to that other pod. But yeah, so basically this is how it goes.

So the story has to do with scientists attempting to teach American sign language to great apes, which, you know, maybe you're aware of this. Maybe you've heard a little bit about this. but I promise that you have not heard all of this. So there was once a time in the field of psychology where researchers really wanted to try and understand the origins of language and how humans acquire it and how it works, basically. And so one of the ways that psychologists decided to try to look into this,

and this was in the 60s and 70s, was by teaching Great Apes American Sign Language because we are closely related to Great Apes. we are a great ape. And so the idea was, well, if we can teach American Sign Language to great apes, to other great apes, like chimps and gorillas, then maybe we can sort of get a sense for how this happens in humans and learn more about ourselves. And so there are some famous apes who were part of these experiments. You probably know about Coco the gorilla. She was a gorilla. a gorilla that was born in San Francisco

and was trained by this woman named Penny Patterson and learned to sign and she died in 2018 and then there's also one who is a lesser known but super important that you might have also heard about named Nim Chimpsky. Now Nim Chimpsky was a chimp and he was named after Nomechomsky but in the like sneaky tramsky

trying to like laugh at Noam Chomsky kind of way. And he was trained, well, the lead researcher was this guy who is still around. He's a professor at Columbia University and his name is Herbert Terrace. So Penny Patterson is also still around by the way. So Herbert Terrace and Penny Patterson, two people you need to know about. So basically, you know, think about it. We're in the 70s, scientists are like, ooh, language. Like, how does it work? What is it? Can we teach it to animals? Can we talk to animals? And you have these two experiments that happened at one point simultaneously. So you have this Coco the Gorilla being taught American Sign Language in the San Francisco area. And then you also have Nim Chimpsky being taught American Sign Language in New York City.

So, and by New York City, I mean like a brownstone in New York City. Oh, wow. This chimp living with a family in a brownstone. Totally wild stuff. There's a lot that I could dig into about how weirdly set up these experiments were. But I think the really important thing to know is that while the aim of these experiments was to teach American sign language to Great Apes, the people, the scientists who were doing this teaching barely knew that language themselves.

So they were not deaf, they were not fluent in sign language, they had not grown up in deaf families, this was something that they kind of picked up very fast, thinking like, hey, I'll just learn a brand new language and then try to teach it to another B. Who signed off on this? And that is, sorry? Like, who signed off on this? There's a lot of moving pieces here.

Honestly, this is something that I really dig into in the final episode of a show about animals that was published just before the bonus episode of a show about animals. So if you look at the feed, you'll be able to find it. But yeah, this was kind of how things were done back then, and it does kind of denote, in my opinion, a honestly, a sort of condescension when it comes to American Sign Language and the complexities of this language and its value. And I actually find that to be quite sad

because in my mind it is very clear that these scientists were like, I can just pick up American sign language, this will be easy, and then I can teach a language to an animal. And that is like some of the like really not pretty sides of this kind of work. There were other things that were kind of sad about this work and kind of weird. So for instance, Cocoa the gorilla was fed a lot of meat throughout her life. Gorillas are definitely super vegetarian. And, you know, it's hard to say exactly what kind of impact that I might have had on Coco,

but like it is clear that it was not, they were not attempting to try to replicate the life that these animals could have in the wild, right? A lot of them were dressed, they were wearing clothes. At one point, NIM was breastfed by, a woman who was caring for him, which I spoke to that woman. I spoke to her about it for the podcast. And she had her reasons for doing that. But, yeah, there were some things.

They also sometimes, like, NIM was given weed to smoke, to chill him out. So, you know, there's a lot of stuff. It was the 70s. And things were done in a particular way. and some of it was really chaotic. The Nim Chimski experiment, I think in particular, was incredibly chaotic. So if you want to hear about that, go check out the podcast. So I've spent the last few months talking to people who worked on these experiments,

and they've detailed all of these wild things that were going on back then. And also like the rather sad conclusions of these studies. I want to give too much away about that, but I do want to talk about the science for a little bit. So both NIM and Coco were raised almost exclusively surrounded by humans with the idea that they would pick up language through reward. Right. So sort of in the same way that like when you are a kid, if you say your first word, your parents are like, oh my God, good job. And then you say it again. Like kind of with that idea.

Also kind of like what we do with a dog when the dog finally sits, you know, like a similar thing. I was going to say it's like when you get M&Ms for pooping in. the potty, which actually, fun fact, my older sister got M&Ms, but then for me, my parents switched to Cheerios. That's so disrespectful. That is really not okay. They realized it was just being handed something and being, ooh. Remind me to talk about your mom, to talk to your mom about this next time I see her.

Yeah, absolutely. It will. She told her not. Not. that's amazing okay yeah so the idea is like and they also you know they drill them

they are trying to teach them all of these words and the chimps the chimp and the gorilla they're picking up these signs and they are requesting things they and to the people training these animals it really seems like they're having a conversation that there's a dialogue they feel like they're learning a lot

and it seems like it's working And so Coco is starting to become famous. She's on the cover of Nat Geo. She is starting to get known. And then meanwhile, Nim Chimpsky, at some point the experiment, is stopped. It ends, kind of abruptly. And Nim gets sent back to Oklahoma, where he was taken from when he was two weeks old. Oh, my God, but he was a sophisticated city brownstone ape now.

Right. Who's also never been around other chimps since he was two weeks old. And so he is now a traumatized chimp surrounded by other chimps and doesn't know how to interact on. So it's actually quite sad. Yeah. So the experiment ends. And the reasoning behind that is that NIM is now dangerous, according to Herbert Terrace. He is biting people.

He is, I mean, he's being a chimp. Yeah. He's upset. That's just like a normal adult behavior. But they don't have. So at this point, they're in a mansion in the Bronx. where that's where they're teaching him sign language. They don't have any of the protocols in place that you would see in a zoo. There are no safety measures for any of the people working with

NIM. So it was extremely poorly run in that respect. And NIM gets sent back and Herbert Teres says he's too dangerous. After that, he starts analyzing the data, the videos, he starts looking at the videos. And he writes up a study where he's like, it worked. I taught sign language to this chimp. I'm I like, we did great. He even submits it to a journal. And then at one point he is looking at the tapes again, he sees, and he notices something. He notices that the teacher, in one particular clip, he notices that the teacher appears to be signing some of the signs that NIM signs, like a half a second before NIM signs them. And he's like, shit. I am a victim of the Cleverhont's effect. I can tell you what the clever Hans effect is. But basically what he's saying is like, oh, these animals are getting prompted. Like, regardless of whether it's like, they either know that if you ask a certain things, what, like, cloud, like word cloud they need to be in.

Like, if you say, like, oh, do you love me? And they'll be like, love, caring, happy. And then, like, everybody's, like, happy because they're like, oh, okay. So like they learn that or they're actually just repeating signs that they're seeing in any given moment. So he notices that. He publishes a completely different study. So he retracts the before the first study gets, gets published, he retracts it, rewrites it, resubmits it. And that's how basically the field of ape language research starts to collapse.

This is a big deal because in the study that he publishes, he ends up calling out all the other scientists. It wasn't just Penny Patterson with Coco the Grill. It was a lot of other research that was being done. He calls out all these other scientists saying, you guys are also the victim of the Cleverhans effect. And basically, Cleverhans was this horse, I think in Germany. One would assume. I think it was in Germany.

And it was this horse that was famous for being able to do very simple math problems. And this horse was like touring, the world, the scientists can't figure out how is it that this horse can do very simple math problems. And at some point, it takes them a year to figure it out, actually. They realize that actually Clever Hans is being prompted. And he's being prompted because Cleverhans can only get the response right when his trainer is in the room. And the trainer is not doing anything. At least he doesn't think he is. But he is. So Cleverhands basically he would stomp his hoof on ground until he reached a certain number that was the answer to the very simple math problem.

So let's just say one plus two. He would stomp until three. And he got it right almost all the time. But turns out that the trainer was holding his breath. And he would let it out whenever Hans reached the right number. Oh my gosh. And the horse was attuned to that. He's still quite a clever Hans for no one to do that. Oh, totally. I mean, and that's the thing. And that's the thing. right, it's that even with the idea that like, and by the way, for what it's worth, I actually think that Herbert Terrace and his science that, basically if you ask Herbert Terrace today, he thinks that everything was prompted, these animals never understood what they were doing, he's still very adamant about that. I think that the truth lies somewhere in between.

I do think that these animals, to a certain, like, these, like, if you, they request a banana, The chimp probably actually wants a banana and knows what it's doing, right? But is it a sentence? Is it language, the way we think about language? No, they're mostly just making very simple requests because they can and it works. And then they're also trying to get to the right answer in order to get a reward. So that's a lot of what's going on. And I think that there's a lot of nuance there.

So please listen to the podcast for the full, like, can we talk to animals, answer? but basically with this that what you correctly pointed out is that clever Hans is still incredibly clever right like 100% so smart um because he is reading the cues he is doing what he needs to do in order to get what he wants yeah which is a reward and so are these animals and they are reading our body language in ways that we don't even know is happening right and so It's a different form of intelligence. It's wonderful. The problem is that that's not what these psychologists were trying to study.

They were not trying to study how smart are these animals. They're trying to study, like, what are the origins of language and what can we learn about humans? And so that's why they were teaching these animals a human language, which in many ways is like, why were we doing that? Right. Because it's the question of like, do other species have communication with each other that is like equivalent to human language? Like that's a really interesting question. And then there's like, are animals smart enough to communicate with us effectively, which again is a really interesting question or like are they smart enough? That's even like a weird way to phrase it.

but like is our cognition, like, compatible enough that we can effectively communicate with each other? Interesting question. Both of those are very different from like, can they learn to make human language? Yes. Yeah, no, totally. And I mean, I guess for me, what is like really important is that this isn't the only reason that we have since changed the way that we do a lot of this kind of work, work in this general sphere. but it's a contributor. What happened in the 70s is did contribute to that, which is these days we look more towards like how human animal communication happens, but more on the non-human animals terms. We also look at communication within a species, right? And that is part of a much broader field that we now refer to as animal cognition. And part of what happened in the 70s, that, that avertvert. like it became sort of talking about language with animals became a big no-no and to this day and there are dispute people who dispute this to this day language is still thought of as being a solely a human thing in a lot of spheres of science like we are thought like it is supposed to be like sort of the final frontier the final barrier that separates us from other animals is language

and these studies are part of the reason why that barrier still exists. exists in a lot of fields. Yeah, it's just such a limiting way of thinking about animal cognition, including humans. I know it's very easy for me to say that by being my armchair animal cognition researcher. But like it's just from the outside not having any of, you know, like the burden of this is the way we do things and this is the way things are. It just seems so obviously limiting. and there are so many animals that have like such fascinating and complex intercommunication with each other. And the idea that like that's inherently lesser below some threshold is just like very

limiting. And I think I think one group that's really good about addressing how limiting that is are people who think about like what life on other planets might look like. Because I think all those astrobiologists are like, we're going to, if we're really lucky and we get to Europa and there's some sentient space jellyfish, we are going to have to get our heads out of our own butts. Yeah, 100%. And, you know, the conclusion that I've sort of come to after working on this story for months

is that it is sort of, well, honestly, extremely self-centered, but also sort of extremely naive to think that the only thing that we would need in order to communicate with animals is a shared language. And I think the reason why I've come to that conclusion is because, like, we sense the world and we interact with the world in a certain way, right? My dog senses the world and interacts with the world. Right, my dog, Reggie, senses the world and interacts with the world in a very different way, right? For instance, she can smell things that I cannot at all perceive, right?

she can and so and not only that but she's continuously smelling so the way that a dog's nose is set up like they're just like always smelling even when they're exhaling breath whereas we are only smelling when we take in breath yeah no it's it's super cool they have those fourly little noses is that what that does do yes exactly yes 100% they actually have these little chambers where they like store and it's very cool it's all super cool and they take in so much, sorry, I like kicked my microphone. It's very exciting. I got really excited.

So they take in so much information, right? And so if I were to have a conversation with Reggie, the thing that she would, the things that she would talk to me about, like, let's just say we have a shared language, I wouldn't even begin to be able to grasp. And so thinking that all you need in order to have an actual, like, conversation with an animal is a shared language, is really reductive. really just so, it feels really myopic to me after having like looked at all of this research over a period of months. It was also at the time cutting edge research. People thought that they

were doing something really cool. People fell in love with Coco the gorilla. She was on Reading Rainbow. She was on Mr. Rogers. She was on Mr. Rogers. She became a celebrity. And that the videos of her meeting Robin Williams and the pictures of her meeting Leonardo DiCaprio and all of these celebrities, she was huge. And to this day, people still think that she, her language ability, that her language abilities far exceed what she was actually capable of, because the truth is that she was never actually taught proper American sign language. And even though she may have learned more than a thousand signs over the course of her life, in any given day, the amount of words that she was using was very, very limited. She was still using them to communicate.

100% she was communicating. But she wasn't doing what the, what, well, let me just be direct. She wasn't doing what Penny Patterson says that she was doing, right? And so that is basically, that that was my fact. It was a lot of facts all in one, but that's my fact. Well, I am now going to get caught up on your podcast. Yes. It was in the first couple episodes.

And I'm really excited to listen to the rest. I was just saving it for myself. It's a little, you know, a little treat. It's a great, like, holiday binge. Oh, absolutely. Listeners, don't forget to check out a show about animals. I always think that I'm getting the name wrong because it is also a description of the show. I know.

It's a bit ridiculous. But the joke really is that, and it's not really a joke, it is a show about animals. Except that the species that we're focusing on is mostly actually humans. Wow. I love it. What was the weirdest thing we learned this week? For me, it was the swirly dog noses. There's just like so many.

So the fact within a fact, within a fact, within a fact. I'm still thinking about Nim Chimpsky smoking weed. Like I really haven't even gotten off of that yet. So. Yeah. Well, Ariel, you, you win. Thank you. So thank you for coming on the show.

And listeners, don't forget to check. them out on a show about animals. The weirdest thing I learned this week is a popular science podcast. We're available on all major podcast platforms, so subscribe wherever you're listening now. And if you like what you hear, please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. It helps other weirdos find the show. For more information on the stories you heard in this episode, come find us at popsai.com slash weird.

You can buy our merch, including weirdest thing, t-shirts, totebags, and mugs at popsai.threadless.com. The show is produced by all of our hosts, including me, Rachel Fultman, with editing and audio engineering by Jess Bode. Our theme music is by Billy Caden. If you have questions, suggestions, or weird stories to share, tweet us at Weirdest underscore Thing. Thanks for listening, Weirdos. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. Relax and let Ralph's delivery handle your grocery shopping this week. We start with

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